Age Discrimination Litigation

Product Description

Winning Forms and Strategies for Age Cases

As the percentage of older people in the workplace increases, the need for these workers to receive protection from discrimination grows more urgent. Age Discrimination Litigation can help.

Age discrimination claims can yield big returns. Settlements and jury awards are much higher than those for race, sex, and disability claims. But the lack of direct evidence can make it difficult to survive summary judgment and win fair compensation.

Thankfully, respected litigators L. Steven Platt and Cathy Ventrell-Monsees know what it takes to win age cases. They have tried over 100 age cases and submitted more than 50 amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court and circuit courts. Within Age Discrimination Litigation, they reveal proven strategies, procedures, law, and forms to help you:

• Select winning cases
• Manage the charge-filing process
• Represent multiple plaintiffs
• Beat statutes of limitation
• Draft effective motions
• Focus your discovery
• Resist attempts to limit evidence
• Draft jury instructions
• Overcome defenses
• Protect attorney’s fees

Innovative Techniques

Age Discrimination Litigation offers dozens of powerful strategies, all annotated and many available nowhere else:

• How to avoid losing on summary judgment on pretext issues: changing reasons, discriminatory comments, ageist culture, comparable qualifications, statistical evidence, and more.
• Does FICA need to be withheld from age discrimination settlements and awards? May settlement agreements be structured to further reduce tax liability? Read Tax Aspects of Settlements, §12:110, and its cited cases and decide for yourself.
• Plaintiffs: file motions in limine for affirmative use. When to use them, benefits of use, and factors weighed in their grant or denial, all with supporting authority.
• How to use disparate impact statistics to prove pretext in disparate treatment cases, even when the sample size is small.
• The enforceability of confidentiality agreements under OWBPA, with 4 model settlement agreements.
• Post-Kimel exceptions where state employers can still be sued under federal law: voluntary state consent, federal spending power, 14th Amendment, and suits against municipal governments or individual state officials.

Proven Forms

The discovery, settlement, and trial forms immediately raise the level of your advocacy.

Discovery

• Seven sets of Plaintiff’s Interrrogatories: termination, failure to hire, failure to promote, demotion/termination, defendant’s experts, state human rights commission for failure to promote and termination.
• Six Requests for Production of Documents: termination, retaliation, failure to hire, state human rights commission long and short forms.
• Plus Requests for Admissions, Deposition Checklists, Expert Witness Discovery Checklists, and much more.

Motions

• Plaintiff’s Rule 56(f) Motion for a Continuance to Conduct Discovery, with annotated drafting tips.
• Detailed and heavily-annotated Memorandum in Support of Plaintiff’s Motion for Attorney’s Fees, with supporting affidavits from lead counsel, supporting counsel, and plaintiff.

Settlement and Trial

• Retainer Agreement with provisions covering: installment payments, fees if reinstatement, cost reimbursements, statutes of limitations, right to withdraw, split representation, and tax consequences.
• Over 50 annotated Jury Instructions, including several each for prima facie case, pretext, proof, retaliation, and damages.

Focused on Issues

Age Discrimination Litigation contains well-supported discussions of frequently-recurring legal issues, citing over 1,500 cases. Authoritative analysis is provided for the law of: constructive discharge, forced retirement, demotions, failure to promote, forced transfers, hostile work environment, what constitutes “willfulness,” failure to apply, differences in pay, severance offset with retirement benefits, retaliation, reasonable job search efforts, after-acquired evidence. and circuit-by-circuit summaries of the decisions on:

• What constitutes pretext
• Consideration of pretext at summary judgment
• The effect of failing to apply for a position
• Hiring qualifications plaintiff must show
• Plaintiff’s burden of proof in RIF cases
• How the courts define “direct evidence”
• When reinstatement is the preferred remedy
• When front pay is an appropriate remedy
• Whether a judge or jury is to decide front pay
• When punitive damages are allowed

REVISION 16 HIGHLIGHTS

In this 16th edition of Age Discrimination Litigation, you receive new and updated text on a broad range of topics, from filing suit to summary judgment. The highlights include:

NEW SECTIONS

• Trends in Age Discrimination Charges and Litigation
• Employer Defined — Native American Tribes and Immunity
• Exceptions Permitting Mandatory Retirement
• Pay Discrimination
• EEOC Online System and New Inquiry Form Replace Holowecki Intake Questionnaire
• EEOC’s Public Portal for Charges

REVISED, UPDATED and EXPANDED COVERAGE

• Trends in Supreme Court ADEA decisions
• Comparing ADEA and Title VII — differences in methods of proof and remedies
• Proving the employer meets the twenty-employee threshold
• Employer defined
• Sovereign immunity issues
• §1983 claims
• Establishing a prima facie case of hostile work environment
• The foreign workplace defense
• Interacting with the EEOC
• Dismissals and notices of right to sue
• Admissibility of cause determinations
• Federal employee complaint procedures — mixed case complaints
• Direct vs. indirect methods of proving disparate treatment
• Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. should not apply to federal employees’ ADEA claims
• Evidence of discriminatory motive:
• Ageist comments vs. stray remarks
• Standards for subordinate bias liability (aka “cat’s paw” or “rubber stamp” liability)
• Statements by non-decision-makers
• Comments about retirement
• Treatment of comparators
• Proving discrimination based on age plus another protected trait
• Strategies for effectively opposing summary judgment